I've got pie but I'm not a pion

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Things that strike you
I must have listened to the song '(You) Tattooed Me' by Tom Robinson over a hundred times easily, it has been on heavy rotation on mix-tapes / CDs / iPods for 20 years I think. Today, for the first time it occurred to me that the lines
"When I was sound asleep as you left to join the fleet
You tattooed your name with a needle in my arm"
perhaps don't quite work, you would have to be very sound asleep indeed!

The lyrics on the website of the gentleman broadcaster himself say 'drunk asleep' but even so... (and the lyrics don't quite match up with the album version (which is also available to download free from the website.
There is actually another live version on Tom's website, where the year changes from 54 to 34. But (an alternative) 1934 or 2034? And the peace talks move from Dublin to Geneva.
Not as SFnal as 'Drive All Night' from the same album, though.

It's a kind of (partition) magic
Thanks for the responses, I have forwarded them!

Partition Magic and similar
Quick question... does anyone have any recentish experience with Partition Magic or similar? My cousin's partner wants to make her new PC duel boot. Going to XP SP3 & Ubuntu instead of just Ubuntu, as I understand it.

And whilst in random links mode...
... some of you may not have heard the self-referential boy-band-stylee song
Title of the song

Hell is other people's C++, cont.
This amused me. It is from the blog of Peter Seibel, author of Coders At Work (which more accurately could be titled 'People who write about software or writing software talk to someone who writes about software and he writes about it). I had a look at Bjarne Stroustrup's web-site to see if he had responded to Ken Thompson's account
"When Stroustrup read the interview he came screaming into my room about how I was undermining him and what I said mattered and I said it was a bad language. I never said it was a bad language. On and on and on." (quoted in the link above, quoted from the book).
Stroustrup's FAQ is fairly abrasive, and I am surprised he has yet to respond to this, but he hasn't updated it since the end of July.

Having said that, there is something of the Slashdot weenie in many of those comments about C++ in that article, however one of the comments is I think particularly telling..

"And I know a couple of people who are masters of C++ and I love to see how they do things because I think they don’t rely on it for the stuff that it’s not really that good at but totally use it as almost a metaprogramming language". Yes, well, hmm. I am trying to think of a good simile for this, something about someone talking about how they like to see chef X make creative use of his chainsaw without safety catch in the kitchen springs somhow to mind.

Grrrr
Semagic is playing up. Apologies to those who have seen a malformed post come and go twice. Grrrr.

BBC news story so big pinch of salt, obviously
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/8339647.stm

"An Australian psychology expert who has been studying emotions has found being grumpy makes us think more clearly.

In contrast to those annoying happy types, miserable people are better at decision-making and less gullible, his experiments showed. "

Dilemmas of LJ
Defriend the dead, which seems wrong somehow, or be reminded of their birthdays.

Question
Has anyone tried one of these things where you play it a chunk of music and it tells you what it is? Do they work?

There is a track I had years ago on a tape, alright decades, of some sort of soft jazz variety. Whilst we were at Marguta, probably the best vegetarian restaurant in the world, in Rome, they played this track, which I had forgotten about but was buried in my subconscious. Sadly when I asked it wasn't a CD, but was some sort of satellite radio service. I could probably find a tape with a crappy recording off the radio but on the whole I think it is only worth tracking down (it will be on a BASF C90 with a number written on it, in a box, somewhere, perhaps), if I can play it to the interwebs and have it tracked down.
I think I can rule out it being Spyro Gyra or Earl Klugh, who were the main exponents of such jazz who got mainstream(ish) radio play in the early 80s, though it is someone vaguely of that ilk.

So...
Back from holiday. I definitely recommend Budapest, which has a fine decaying in places fin de siècle splendour. The Metro line 1 which was the first underground line in continental Europe is particularly lovely.
This picture from Wikipedia doesn't really do it justice but is better than the ones I could find on Flikr. The hotel (Novatel) was an odd mix of art nouveau original features and Novatel blandness. Because quite a lot of London was built at the same time and, indeed, one could argue that Britain was at its peak at the same time, there is an odd mirror world feel to it. Though, of course, much less has happened to Budapest since due to their being essentially on the wrong side in both world wars and then not much building happening under the communist regime.

But I could have done without the car going 'bing' half way back from Gatwick and even more so I could have done without the power steering failing whilst turning right on a roundabout. Also, my phone has had what appears to be one of its failure modes (a message complaining it doesn't have a Sony Ericsson battery followed by it refusing to find any mobile networks). A Google for suitable keywords revealed that this seems to be a known problem and amid the voices crying into the wilderness was a suggestion that upgrading the firmware would fix it. This has gone surprisingly smoothly and seems to have done the trick. Hoorah. And it would have been a bit of a downer if this had happened whilst we were away, so better now than earlier. Bizarre though.

More Google Poetry (from Budapest)
More about...
Love Words »
Love Poems »
Love Lyrics »
Removing Scars »

About A Boy
Something which occurred to me on the way to work by an obscure chain of associations... can anyone think of a plausible reason why the film of About A Boy substituted the Nirvana plot with a rather lame and inferior one? The book seemed to me to be obviously written with 1.99 eyes on a film adaption with Hugh Grant.
If there was a problem with rights, couldn't they have had Bert Bobain, lead singer of Oblivion or somesuch? You wouldn't need that many lines of exposition to get this across.

Cat or bin-bag?
Yes, it's the day where greyhounds play 'cat or bin-bag?', the greyhound equivalent to 'cheese or font' etc. Today Harvey did particularly badly, missing the only real cat we saw, which cunningly hid behind a recycling box.

It is disturbing
When people disable comments on their posts and don't have mood or music, because then the friends list page runs two stories together with a paragraph gap so if you are not looking carefully it looks like the first paragraph of the next (i.e. previous) post is just the next paragraph of the previous (i.e. next) post.

The pen of my grandfather's aunt
'Lines on reading a book of Kelly Link short stories' by E J Weasel, 17 3/4

The pen of my grandfather's aunt is grey.
The pen of my grandfather's aunt may be of extraterrestrial origin.
The pen of my grandfather's aunt has a slogan on the side in Linear A. If only we knew what it meant.
The pen of my grandfather's aunt usually writes in turquoise ink. It smudges easily.
The pen of my grandfather's aunt compels those who use it to dot their Is with little stars.
The pen of my grandfather's aunt writes tales of loss, of disappointment, of unfaithfulness.
The pen of my grandfather's aunt produces doodles that from time to time look unfortunately like 'Kathy' cartoons.
I have stuck the pen of my grandfather's aunt up the bottom of a stuffed okapi.

Drum and Bass^H^H^H^H Theremin
For fans of such things, there is an Oxford Contemporary Music thing featuring a drummer and a thereminist at Modern Art Oxford next Thursday, 15th.
Irksomely it is at 6 p.m. Also, the 'I am wacky' photo on the website http://www.ocmevents.org/events/Autumn%2009/rochford/rochford.htm does not thrill me. It reminds me of the photo of Rebecca Carrington http://www.rebeccacarrington.co.uk/ so has been Done Before.
We have the DVD of cello based humour if anyone would like to borrow it (a mixture of English and simple German in the main).
The DVD of theremin based humour cannot be far behind.

In the words of I. M. Weasel, "He was a fine monkey and a genuinely talented theremin player."

The City And The City
Questions about this book, which I haven't read, but cut for spoilers anyway...
( Read more... )

Hokey Cokey (F1 edition)
Am I the only person to have noticed that Kazuki Nakajima and Heikki Kovalainen both fit well into the Hokey Cokey?

Oooooh Heikki Kovalainen
Ka-Zuki Nakajima
Oooooh Heikki Kovalainen
Knees bend arms stretch rah rah rah